I doubt it. We all want to believe that a quick loss of service will cause societal collapse but the reality is people are much more resilient.
Think back to the nyc blackout in 2003, you’d think it would result in mad max style craziness.
But what actually happened was most folks chilling out together with no real crime wave and the only issue was bodegas overcharging fools for ice cubes.
I say this provided that the blackout was temporary.
If the shit was permanent then that’s a different issue. At a certain point insulin goes bad, antibiotics go bad, everything rots and you have a different scenario entirely.
They said internet blackout. Which really wouldn’t be too bad in the long term. The world functioned fine without the internet for millennia’s before. The short term would be difficult, but lots of my industry would be relatively unaffected. Things would just take a lot longer, efficiency would be reduced, and there would be a lot more phone calls and hard copy files. Just like in the 70’s and 80’s, before computers were truly common.
It’s probably worth asking how the internet is blacked out. If LANs still work, lots of organizations could limp along at slightly reduced capacity until something was figured out. We’d probably see a resurgence in things like link local connections, data loops, etc… But if LANs go down too, lots of things will need to be rebuilt to continue to function. Lots of industries have heavy machinery that are entirely reliant on a stable LAN connection.
Sure, lots of fully online businesses would basically be killed overnight. But the world as a whole would continue, because the internet isn’t a hard necessity for society to exist.
To the point of ‘how the Internet blacked out’ - a lot of what you think of as ‘phone’ today actually goes via IP over data, not analog voice. It would mean we all have to turn back on our land lines, which would take ages and a lot of business and logistics would be pretty rough for a while. Those few places with working phones would have lines of people waiting to use them until it was restored more widely.
I doubt it. We all want to believe that a quick loss of service will cause societal collapse but the reality is people are much more resilient.
Think back to the nyc blackout in 2003, you’d think it would result in mad max style craziness.
But what actually happened was most folks chilling out together with no real crime wave and the only issue was bodegas overcharging fools for ice cubes.
I say this provided that the blackout was temporary.
If the shit was permanent then that’s a different issue. At a certain point insulin goes bad, antibiotics go bad, everything rots and you have a different scenario entirely.
They said internet blackout. Which really wouldn’t be too bad in the long term. The world functioned fine without the internet for millennia’s before. The short term would be difficult, but lots of my industry would be relatively unaffected. Things would just take a lot longer, efficiency would be reduced, and there would be a lot more phone calls and hard copy files. Just like in the 70’s and 80’s, before computers were truly common.
It’s probably worth asking how the internet is blacked out. If LANs still work, lots of organizations could limp along at slightly reduced capacity until something was figured out. We’d probably see a resurgence in things like link local connections, data loops, etc… But if LANs go down too, lots of things will need to be rebuilt to continue to function. Lots of industries have heavy machinery that are entirely reliant on a stable LAN connection.
Sure, lots of fully online businesses would basically be killed overnight. But the world as a whole would continue, because the internet isn’t a hard necessity for society to exist.
To the point of ‘how the Internet blacked out’ - a lot of what you think of as ‘phone’ today actually goes via IP over data, not analog voice. It would mean we all have to turn back on our land lines, which would take ages and a lot of business and logistics would be pretty rough for a while. Those few places with working phones would have lines of people waiting to use them until it was restored more widely.